It all started six months after having my second baby. My skin went from behaving well to having an outright tantrum. The left side of my face suffered the worst, with angry spots and countless under-the-surface bumps that turned up overnight. My skin became easily irritated. A facialist once told me that my skin was so unfazed by different ingredients that it could handle anything thrown at it and wouldn’t react - a fact that I was proud of. As a beauty editor, it made me the department guinea pig, and meant that, of the products we’re sent, I could pick whatever I fancied knowing there would be no fallout. At first, I put the changes down to hormones and general post-baby fatigue, but after a week that then turned into a month, it was time to seek help.

I decided to give my GP a try. He sympathised with my predicament but his solutions weren’t particularly fruitful; he told me that adult acne was a very common experience for a woman in her mid-thirties. Alexia Inge, founder of Cult Beauty, has also seen an increase: “In the past few years we’ve noticed a huge rise in queries, both with customers searching this term on the site as well as appeals for help from our customer service.”

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Skin

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My doctor then recommended Roaccutane or the contraceptive pill, but I wasn’t bothered enough to treat it with medication, and my blood tests returned “sufficient”, so no further investigation was warranted. I dabbled with anti-irritation creams and applied every spot solution going, but I was managing the situation rather than dealing with the problem. On a press appointment to discuss new treatments, Dr Frances Prenna Jones told me that I had a lot of milia (tiny bumps under the skin), most likely caused by a build-up of moisturiser and under-exfoliated skin. “If we over-moisturise, the pore openings become blocked, but the glands keep producing secretions and become engorged with oils - ‘potentials’, as I call them. These can then calcify and become milia,” she explained. The solution? Stop using moisturiser. For me at least.

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Skin

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So I stripped back my Korean-inspired layering regime to the bare minimum. I started using Formula 2006, Prenna Jones’s miracle lotion that now acts as my complete skincare system. It exfoliates the top layer of skin, contains anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory ingredients and leaves skin hydrated. Hydrated enough not to need moisturiser. I know, almost unbelievable. In tandem with my experience, it seems minimal-product skincare brands are on the rise too: Vintner’s Daughter has only one “hero” oil - Active Botanical Serum - and Elixseri is a serum-only brand, no moisturisers included.

Back in the doctor’s chair, Prenna Jones painstakingly purged my milia and used peels to treat the area. Almost as quickly as it came, my problem was gone. My skin is still sensitive but it’s behaving. I’ve introduced a couple of products to complement my new, minimal skincare line-up but for now: moisturiser, it’s not you, it’s me, so can we go on a break?